Yoo skates through.

The Obama administration has decided that this and future administrations that engage in human rights abuses and war crimes should not fear punishment. They implemented this decision by using a reliable Department of Justice career veteran, David Margolis, to quash the recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility that Bush administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee not face possible disbarment for approving the use of torture. (If we're all scared, it's okay, right?)

Now comes the news that many of Yoo's email messages while at DOJ have mysteriously gone missing. So much for restoring confidence in the integrity of the U.S. government at home and abroad.

Rooting out torture.

In considering whether to appoint a prosecutor to investigate torture, Obama is deciding whether to dip a toe into the cesspool that Bush administration created with its torture and detainment policies. Cleaning up this mess could is the most important legacy President Obama will leave. A generation or two or more later, if the US goes down such a dark path again, people will ask why Obama failed to reinstill a national ethos that humane treatment and due process are the bedrock on which out nation stands or falls. (See my previous post.)

We're not in Kansas anymore, are we?

A report from the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department, says The NY Times, found that a former senior official at the Justice Department, Bradley Schlozman, "selected conservative lawyers for prime assignments and transferred three lawyers out of the Civil Rights Division because they were seen as liberals who were opposed to his political agenda. All three later brought federal discrimination claims and returned to the division after Mr. Schlozman left. The transfers, the report found, violated federal civil service law and 'constituted misconduct.'

"The investigation found that among people hired by Mr. Schlozman, 63 of 65 were considered Republican or conservative, but that when he was not involved, 'the results were more balanced,' with conservatives and liberals split about evenly.

"In a 2003 voice-mail message to a colleague, Mr. Schlozman said experience in civil rights law was not needed to work for the division. 'I just want to make sure we don’t start confining ourselves to, you know, Politburo members because they happen to be a member of some, you know, psychopathic left-wing organization designed to overthrow the government,' he said." (It's amazing how conservatives embrace affirmative action if it applies only to conservatives - see my previous post.)

"The investigators for the inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that Mr. Schlozman’s repeated denials to the Senate in 2007 that he had used ideological considerations in his personnel decisions constituted a 'false statement,' and they referred the matter to prosecutors for criminal prosecution last year."

The United States Attorney’s Office, headed by a Bush appointee, declined to prosecute. Mr. Schlozman is happily practicing law in his native Kansas.

No credit? No problem if you're dealing with the Bush administration.

A sly college student activist recently was able to disrupt a fire sale of oil and gas leases announced by the Bush administration on election day by bidding up the prices at auction and buying leases at high prices other bidders could not afford. The truly astounding thing about this sting is that it could only be accomplished because the Bush administration is still blind to the lessons from the mortgage crisis. They were so eager to sell off government assets on the cheap that they didn't do a credit check on the buyers. The student had no money to complete his purchases and the auction can't be repeated until after Obama, who has vowed to stop it, takes office.

McCain will win the election by saying Obama will lose the war.

Obama may lose the election because McCain has changed the conversation about the war. Obama’s huge strength as a candidate is that he had the courage to oppose the worst U.S. foreign policy mistake of the past fifty years, and possibly of all time. Yet, McCain paints Obama as naïve and inexperienced in foreign policy and military affairs. McCain keeps saying that Obama wants to let the U.S. lose the war in Iraq, but Obama is not really answering this charge, except to defend his patriotism and repeat that he will impose a timetable.

What Obama needs to repeat with all is oratory skill is that the war was never really designed to protect American interests. It was a blind spasm by a misguided President, a Wag-the-Dog diversion erected by his neo-con Vice-President who was determined to simultaneously subvert the constitution and destroy many of the noble values for which this country has stood. It has given a blank check to military contractors to whom the Republican Party is beholden, and to an unstable and dependent government in Iraq that will never step up and unless we are serious about stepping out. We financed the entire multi-trillion dollar war on credit and we can't fix our economy until we stop pouring money into this sinkhole. The only way to preserve American dignity, our stature in the world and our national treasury is to get on a timetable. Unlike Bush and McCain, Obama can show that as a leader, he has the discipline to get us out of the mess.

The public tolerated the war for a long time, even as facts mounted that the evidence for it was rigged, because people assumed the war was really about ensuring reliable and affordable fixes for our addiction to oil. Stratospheric gas prices exploded that myth.

Obama has already said these things, but in his quest to be seen as a uniter, he now seems afraid to offend any potential supporter. But unless he steps up, he risks losing the enthusiastic support of those who were passionate about his courage to lead, and worse, being unable to shake McCain’s tagging him as a weak leader. Today, he seems to have moved far away from his bold criticisms in 2002:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

Bush's tax cuts are like a subprime mortgage.

More people are waking up to the fact that the Bush tax cuts cannot be sustained without slowing the growth of the economy, and the tax cuts eventually will have to be scaled back. On top of this, in order to pay the interest on the national debt created by the Bush tax cut, there will have to be a permanent tax increase of at least five percent (see my previous post). This forever tax probably will be even higher, depending on how long the current tax cuts last and whether there is consensus to pay down any of the enormous debt they've created. If you were a twenty year old who got a twenty percent tax decrease for ten years while your income was low, you may not be happy that as a thirty year old you'll face a five, six or seven percent tax increase for the rest of your life when your income is higher. In the end, you'll lose money on this "tax break." Come to think of it, this tax deal is structured like a subprime mortgage. You get a teaser payment upfront, and then get hit with high payments you can't afford later.

Are Republicans victims of battered person syndome?

Here and elsewhere, the long sad story of how the Bush Administration has abused the average U.S. citizen has been well documented and publicized.

• The disastrous war in Iraq is now understood to have been continuously marketed on false pretenses since Bush first proposed it. Opposition to continuing the lie and war is widespread - even among moderate Republicans (except those who are getting rich as private contractors in Iraq). Citizens will pay trillions of their tax dollars and sacrifice the blood of many of the nation's young people for this horrific mistake.
• Even teenagers understand that for the rest of their lives they likely will be paying off Bush's unprecedented, gigantic federal deficits - so far increasing the national debt by more than a four trillion dollars and nearly doubling it. The "free" money people get from Bush's tax cuts and rebates is not free (see my previous post). Today, nearly a tenth of taxes go just toward paying the interest on the national debt, with Bush's deficits responsible for half of that. (Many voters remember that Bill Clinton's fiscal discipline created four years of surpluses. Fewer realize that under Republican Presidents since 1948 we have been subjected to average annual increases in the national debt three times higher than under Democrats.) (Here's an even scarier analysis by a conservative economist.)
• Nearly everyone, except determined hermits, realizes that the Bush promise of getting government out of our lives was a lie regarding civil liberties. Sadly, it was true concerning protecting most of us from the consequences of natural disasters such as hurricanes and global climate change, and from greed and exploitation (a prime example being the subprime mortgage meltdown).

Yet many Republican voters support that party's nominee in 2008, John McCain, who promises very little change from present policies (see my previous post). Could they be suffering from battered person syndrome? A victim of this condition:

becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation. Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault. Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance. Often sufferers will even seek out their very abuser for comfort shortly after an incident of abuse.

Those who forget their inequality are doomed to repeat it.

On the day the first of Bush’s "economic stimulus" tax rebates hit some citizens’ bank accounts, it should be noted that this is the first federal tax rebate in history in a Presidential election year. No one in Washington previously has had the nerve to so openly pander for votes with money. Many economists believe that this will do little to jump start a recession economy, because any boost in consumer discretionary spending will be so short lived. In these tough times, much of this "free" money will simply go to pay off debt or be eaten up in higher prices for groceries and gasoline. (See update.) As a result of increasing the deficit, the government will then have to borrow the rebate money back from rich investors.

Rather than being motivated to use tax cuts and rebates to revive the economy, Bush and his party have a history of using them to pander. In spite of Republican mythology about the 2001 Bush tax cut, it was not about reviving the economy. It was conceived in 1999, when the economy was booming, as a way of getting votes in the 2000 election.

The main reason we have the 2008 rebates is that Republican are hoping lower income people – who have been economically the worst off during the Bush years – will mostly remember the rebate checks they got in July when they go to the polls in November. This sort of appeal worked for California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he unseated the Democratic incumbent in the 2003 recall election. Schwarzenegger promised to roll back a vehicle licensing tax that had been raised due to the state's poor fiscal health. The tax of up to a few hundred dollars per vehicle hit low income people the hardest. Many minority voters chose a Republican for the first time in their lives.

So why did the Democratic Congress go along with this scam? Because, what could else could they do? Once the President proposed and promoted the rebate, opposing it would have resulted in Republicans campaigning against Democrats on the issue in the Fall. Too bad the Democrats did not have the fortitude to just say no.

A Princeton professor of politics recently described his study of the national economic priorities of the two parties over the past sixty years. Under Democratic Presidents, the actual incomes of the middle-class rose more than twice as fast as they did when Republicans owned the White House. The real incomes of the working-poor increased six times as fast during Democratic administrations! The affluent fared equally well with both parties. If Democrats had held the Presidency continuously since 1948, "incomes would be more equal now" than during even the most egalitarian era of the 1950's. The professor notes that "Every Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower presided over increasing economic inequality, while only one Democrat — Jimmy Carter — did so."

Why do many middle class and working poor voters not reward Democrats for their superior economic stewardship? The professor believes that Republican Presidents’ use of their new mandates to cut inflation and social spending – hurting the least well off – wear off after three years, producing a perceived boost in the next election year for those that have suffered the most. Democrats’ policies helping the poor and middle-class also run their course after three years, creating a perceived decline that coincides with the next election cycle. As Republicans know so well, the public has a short memory.

Subprime meets nonprosecution.

Neatly tying together my previous posts about the Bush Justice Department's use of deferred prosecution agreements (nonprosecution) and the subprime mortgage crisis comes speculation that a Republican controlled Justice Department would not prosecute companies accused of wrongdoing in the subprime scandal. In fact, the existence of this corporate diversion program may have fueled the subprime crisis by encouraging bad corporate actors to believe they would not be held accountable for wrongdoing, says the NY Times.

More corruption in Bush's "Justice" Department.

Lost in the news about N.Y. Governor Spitzer's prostitution scandal was the Congressional hearing about how the Bush Justice Department lets corporations avoid criminal convictions for corruption or for violations of safety, financial or environmental regulations. In short, big companies that already have a very cozy relationship with the Republican Party can buy their way out by paying friends of the administration to monitor their future conduct. The arrangements have been made by U.S. Attorneys using no guidelines and under no bid contracts. Doesn't this sound like something you'd hear about in Russia or some corrupt developing nation?

One of the largest recipients of one of these deals was none other than former Attorney General John Ashcroft. He is being paid between 28 and 52 million dollars to monitor a medical supply company accused of engaging in kickbacks to increase its sales. You may remember Ashcroft as the chief supporter of the Patriot Act, which contained an unnoticed clause that was at the heart of the U.S. Attorney firings scandal. The government official who set up the no bid monitoring contract for Ashcroft? His former subordinate, Christopher J. Christie, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and a top fund raiser for George Bush in 2000. Christie is now being criticized for awarding a number of these monitoring deals to his friends and political allies.

There were three dozen of these deals done nationally last year. The day before Ashcroft's Congressional testimony, the Justice Department finally announced that it would that require these contracts (euphemistically called "nonprosecution") be approved by the Deputy Attorney General in the future. Now we can all sleep better.

The pollution problem.

Is the quote below The Economist Magazine talking about the Republican Party in the United States, or The New York Times talking about the Communist Party in China? Click here to find out.

Reining in economic growth to alleviate pollution may seem logical, but the country’s political system is addicted to fast growth. Delivering prosperity placates the public, provides spoils for well-connected officials and forestalls demands for political change. A major slowdown could incite social unrest, alienate business interests and threaten the party’s rule.

Slum lords and pimps.

The three elected Republican administrations of my politically conscious lifetime - Nixon, Reagan/Bush and Bush II stand out for their corruption. Nixon was impeached and forced to resign for masterminding the commission of crimes while spying on his political opponents, for obstruction of justice in trying to cover them up, and for lying about that. Reagan appointed scores of crooks to cabinet and administrative positions, who set about using their power to line the pockets of friends and party loyalists or to look the other way while others did so. The Reagan administration set a still unbroken record for the number of its officials indicted or officially investigated for criminal acts – 138. The Savings and Loan scandal alone cost taxpayers $150,000,000,000.

George W. Bush started a war on false pretenses, and then set about awarding billions in no bid contracts to his friends. Now it appears that many of the Iraq infrastructure projects built by U.S. firms are crumbling and stand mostly as monuments to billions of wasted U.S. tax dollars. Iraq’s infrastructure resembles a scene from the recent dystopian satiric film Idiocracy.

The recent resignation of the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a typical example of the rampant corruption in George W. Bush’s administration here at home. She violated federal rules by giving internal agency documents to industry lobbyists that in some cases were used in lawsuits against the agency challenging its conservation policies. She changed the reports of agency scientists to make their findings more favorable to private and corporate interests, and in one case, her own ranch.

The conduct of the Deputy Secretary of State, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development illustrates the administration's hypocrisy. He pushed for funding to promote abstinence at the expense of funding for condom use in AIDS prevention, but resigned last month after it was alleged that he frequented prostitutes. He also was in charge of enforcing a U.S. requirement that aid recipients swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

It is also worth mentioning that Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, and subsequently appointed as head of the World Bank by Bush II, insisted that the greatest problem facing the World Bank is corruption. He now will likely have to resign because of his own corruption at the bank: using his office to obtain a promotion and a hefty raise for his girlfriend.

Perhaps the best illustration of the pervasive corruption under Bush II is the fact that for the first time in history, four Inspectors General simultaneously are under investigation for corruption. These "watchdogs" are appointed by a President to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse. This follows the resignation of three other Inspectors General appointed by Bush II after they were accused of abusing their offices.

Under Bush II, good government always takes a back seat to advancing the power of the G.O.P. Part of this strategy is a widespread effort to "purify" government agencies so that staff, even those in career civil service jobs, are party loyalists. This brings two analogies to mind. The first is the McCarthy era of the 1950's, when Senators McCarthy and Nixon went on a witch hunt for suspected Communists in government. (Watch Good Night, and Good Luck if you want to learn about it.) The second was the practice, during the Communist heydays in the Soviet Union and China, of appointing political officers in every government office and military unit, even in those with as few as a dozen people. The political officer often had more authority than the director or commander, and was responsible for ensuring that policies were in line with party doctrine and that persons suspected of being anything but absolutely loyal were fired or imprisoned. (See The Hunt for Red October for an example.)

As Frank Rich says in his May 13 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times, the focus on party loyalty is the result of Bush II giving his politic strategist Karl Rove free "reign" to remake government. According to Ron Suskind, White House staff have a name to describe their mission: "strategery." This was taken from a Saturday Night Live skit about George Bush in the 2000 election, and reflects the belief that public policy is a farce and politics is all that matters. In Suskind’s January 2003 article, he quotes John DiIulio, an academic who ran the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for Bush II. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything – and I mean everything – being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." DiIulio added that under Bush II, "policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver."

DiIulio's observation has been borne out in the Iraq "reconstruction" effort. In part to bolster the party’s unholy alliance with the religious right, many of the Americans hired by both government and private contractors to rebuild Iraq were hired primarily for being G.O.P. loyalists and staunch religious conservatives, and often were otherwise unqualified for their positions. Most knew nothing about Middle Eastern culture and had never traveled outside the U.S.

The most recent exposure of Bush/Rove strategery, and how it has been implemented by political officers, comes from the story of Monica Goodling, who took the fifth amendment rather than testify before Congress about her role in the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. (See my previous post.) A 1999 graduate of a law school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, she began as an opposition researcher (dirt finder) for the Republican National Committee in the 2000 presidential campaign. Meteorically, she rose to become deputy director of the executive office of the Justice Department, and then became liaison to the White House. She stands accused of using political criteria when interviewing applicants for civil service jobs and for the department's honors program for recent law school graduates. Posing as the anti-Clinton, she even asked some applicants if they had cheated on their spouses. At the age of 32, she received hiring and firing authority for all political appointments in Justice headquarters, including the heads of the various enforcement divisions. (Readers will be relieved to know that she is currently under investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, a political appointee.)

Republican control of Congress over the past twelve years brought a level of corruption unprecedented in past seventy-five years. Ethics and their enforcement were put on hold by Gingrich, Army, DeLay and their cronies. You have to go back to the time of Warren G. Harding to find anything comparable.

Why this pattern? It’s really quite simple. When a basic tenant of your political philosophy is that government is evil and wasteful, it becomes easy to view government as nothing more than a means to power and an exploitable asset. (See Paul Krugman’s March 19 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times.) As Reagan defined it in his inaugural speech, "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." The leaders of the Republican party have treated our government as a slum lord treats an apartment building, as a pimp treats a whore, or as a corporate raider treats an acquired subsidiary. The G.O.P. has no respect for government, except as a tool in the party’s crusades for permanent power and as a means to increase the personal wealth of its elites. This has been consistent across four decades of G.O.P. Presidencies.

Postscript: Those who argue that the Clinton administration was similarly corrupt have been getting their news from right wing talk radio. Republican Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who spent most of Clinton’s time as President investigating him, spent more than 50,000,000 tax dollars to prove nothing more damaging to the administration than that Clinton cheated on his wife and lied about it. Clinton did let some big political donors spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom, which was not illegal. Republicans castigated him for this, but in the hypocrisy that comes so easily to them, recently rewarded their big donors with seats at the official state dinner for the Queen of England.

Update: The book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, describes how conservatives have set about destroying government from within for the reasons described above.

Rove's latest dirty trick: The Patriot Act prosecutor switch

Just when you may have thought there might be nothing more to know about the extraordinary malfeasance by the Bush administration, come more sickening details. A little-known provision of the "Patriot" Act apparently was designed for no other purpose than to allow Karl Rove to create more Republican pseudo prosecutors to run for Congress. The plan, as described in a N.Y. Times Op-ed, kills two birds with one stone. It lets Bush axe some particularly effective prosecutors of corrupt Republicans and replace them with inexperienced novices who will then use their new title of U.S. Attorney as a tough-on-crime credential to win a seat in the 2008 election. Diabolical. The change in the Patriot Act allows the newbies to serve indefinitely as interim U.S. Attorneys without ever having to face the embarrassment of rejection by the Senate.

As with so many of these political dirty tricks and abuses of power, Democrats will not have enough guile to use them if they get the White House back, so there is very little downside for the Republicans. Public outcry (and maybe some sense of the integrity that is critical to public trust in the inherent power of the U.S. Attorney post) probably will motivate Democrats to close this wormhole if they get the chance to overhaul the Patriot Act. But who knows? The bar has been set so low it may never get raised back to where it was before Bush came to town. (See followup story.)

George and Dick imagined as "Thelma and Louise"

See Thelma and Louise Imperialism: Over the Cliff with George and Dick? by Tom Engelhardt. (imdb link)

Bush spins himself as a stunned onlooker of events in Iraq.

Today President Bush added his own voice to the chorus seeking to increase public perception of the administration’s distance from the policies of Iraq government. (See earlier posts 1 & 2) His verbal imagery took me back to a scene from my own past. I crashed a hang glider I was piloting into a parking lot full of cars. By the time onlookers could get over to the me, I had already unhooked myself from the craft and was standing up– although very dazed. As curious people arrived, I simply blended into the crowd–too numb to accept the role of either perpetrator or victim.

That’s what Bush seems to be doing with Iraq. He’s now pretending to be just one of the crowd of stunned on lookers at a crash scene. On the PBS News Hour, he said, "If you were to take it and put me in an opinion poll and said ‘Do I approve of Iraq’ I’d be one of those that said, ‘No, I don’t approve of what’s taking place in Iraq."’ Bush also criticized the Iraq government’s execution of the Saddam–the man the U.S. handed over to Iraq to be hung and that Bush has called the man who "tried to kill my father." (See earlier posts 3 & 4) Ironically, given his personal issues with Saddam, Bush said the hanging "looked like it was kind of a revenge killing."

Eventually, someone will remind Bush that he’s been piloting the ship of state.

U.S. to Iraq: "You just can't change your evil ways..."

As I said in my previous post, the Saddam execution is serving as a focal point for the Bush Administration's efforts to distance itself from the new regime it created in Iraq, so as to smooth the way for an inevitable abandonment. According to a new New York Times article, U.S. officials are saying:

• The hanging reveals "how the 'new Iraq' is starting to resemble, the repressive, vengeful place it was under Mr. Hussein, albeit in a paler shade."
• "The way it has come out with the hanging, we’ve substituted one dictatorship for another.”

My previous post also scoffed at U.S. claims that it was compelled to bow to Iraqi sovereignty on the timing and manner of Saddam's execution, and the New York Times article contains more U.S. spin on this. However, the article also notes that the American military fort ironically named "Camp Justice" completely encloses the Istikhbarat prison in which Saddam was executed, and where thousands of hangings occurred under Saddam's regime.
(A Carlos Santana song inspired the post title)

The light at the bottom of the gallows.

Against the backdrop of recommendation by a New Jersey legislative commission that the State abolish the death penalty because it does not serve "a legitimate purpose" and "is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency," the U.S. government appears to be spinning the story that it bowed to the wishes of the sovereign nation of Iraq as to the timing of Saddam’s execution. Not turning Saddam over "would have involved riding roughshod over the Iraqi leaders’ insistence on their sovereignty in the execution," says an unnamed source in the New York Times. Balderdash – American taxpayers bought the Iraq government and are still paying for it.

It’s just a coincidence that the execution happened on the Friday evening before New Year’s weekend, 10:10 PM, Washington Time, the beginning of a non-religious holiday, when, for the next three-and-a-half days, the fewest number of people in the U.S. were reporting, reading or viewing the news. And, that the preparations for national mourning over the death of President Ford three days before were dominating what little news bandwidth there was. The White House claims that President Bush went to sleep without knowing whether the execution had been carried out, which would have been just after 9 PM Texas time, because he "knew that it was going to happen." If Iraq really is "sovereign nation," how did he "know" with such certainty?

A more likely explanation for U.S. insistence that Iraq is operating independently is that the Bush administration has now written off the whole affair as a bad investment, and wants to be in a position to wash it hands of it before the President’s term expires. The more opportunities Washington can give the Iraqi government to screw up before then, the easier it will be for Bush to blame the failure on them. Here is how the administration is using the New York Times to weave this theme:

For the past three years, the United States has attempted to lay the foundations in Iraq for a civil society and a nation under law. American officials say privately that the Maliki government, by allowing the Hussein execution to be conducted as it did, signaled more powerfully than ever before that it was unwilling or incapable of surmounting the deep sectarian divisions here.

Expect to hear "We gave them a great shot, and they blew it" repeated many times before the last American flies on the last flight out of Baghdad. Nobody in the current administration fought in Vietnam, but they surely remember the mockery of the "light at the end of the tunnel" promises when that last helicopter lifted away from the American embassy in Saigon, and they want to avoid it this time.

The mother of all renditions.

The U.S. continues its post-911 practice of rendition - turning suspects over to foreign governments to be tortured or killed. The U.S. had custody of Saddam until just before his execution and handed him over to Iraq specifically so they could hang him, despite a last minute stay of execution filed in a U.S. Federal Court. True, there was a trial first, but many said that it fell far below international standards for those accused of war crimes and human rights violations. (See blog debate.) This rendition is another example of the U.S. relying on nations with lower human rights standard to do dirty work we don't want to do ourselves. The right thing to do would have been to turn Saddam over to the International Criminal Court. However, Bush hates the idea that any international body should set or enforce standards for the of conduct war - it might limit his ability to kill people or subject him to prosecution for things he has already done.

The only humor I see in all this is that if someone ever writes a musical about Saddam, Bush or Tony Blair, it would have to include a scene in which Saddam performs a rendition of the Bee Gees I've Just Got to Get a Message to You. Trying desperately to appeal for mercy to death penalty opponent Tony Blair, Saddam would sing: "Ive just got to get a message to you, hold on, hold on. One more hour and my life will be through...." Strange but true: At the time of Saddam's execution, Tony was vacationing with Bee Gee Robin Gibb in Miami.

"The Americans want Saddam to be hanged respectfully."

"The Americans also want to prevent the mutilation of his corpse, as has happened to other deposed Iraqi leaders." (Associated Press story.) U.S. democracy continues to spread its influence and good will in the Middle East....

Just to further prove that the U.S. opposes strongman governments in which leaders pursue their personal vendettas against their enemies, Bush keeps Saddam's personal pistol in his private study in the White House. (See press conference in which he talks about the gun.) See my earlier post on Saddam's death sentence.

Taxation without explanation: How the refund of an illegal regressive tax makes it even more regressive.

I'm not anti-tax or even anti-government or anti-IRS, but my recent exploration of the procedure for refunding the federal excise tax on telephone service left me feeling angry. Why is an administration run by a President who has such professed hatred of taxes not seizing this opportunity to proactively send out checks to taxpayers, the way he did early in his administration when he slammed record tax cuts through Congress?

The IRS is calling this the "Telephone Excise Tax Refund," or TETR for short. Perhaps the administration's Iraq policy, which is teetering on the brink of collapse, is sucking up all the planning bandwidth that otherwise might go into a phased withdrawal of treasury funds back into the pockets of consumers.

TETR applies to "long distance" service. It does not apply to the federal excise tax on local land-line telephone service. Efforts to repeal that tax continue in Congress.

TETR came about after a recent, but long, court battle that resulted in the IRS conceding that the excise tax was being illegally collected. As part of this, the IRS agreed to refund the tax for the past three-year period in which taxpayers could still legally amend their returns.

TETR is the legacy of a luxury tax that had been intended to pay for an earlier war: the Spanish-American War in 1898. (Telephones were only used by the rich at that time.) That war was back in the day when Presidents were expected to pay for wars by raising taxes. It was considered unmanly and cowardly to put the political burden of raising taxes on one's successors. (Now, such behavior is considered politically clever - a sure sign of societal moral decay.) Politics was much simpler then; before that war no one had used film as a propaganda tool.

Today, telephone service is considered a basic part of daily life and not a luxury. Particularly for poor people who live in high crime or remote areas, it can be a life-line. Yet, there are people in the U.S. who cannot afford to have a telephone - a reminder that although technological advancements grow more affordable, the economic gulf between the rich and the poor is growing larger. A tax on such a vital service particularly hurts poor people.

For small businesses, the IRS worked with accountants and the business lobby to create a formula for estimating their TETR. Businesses just have to grab a phone bill from before the tax was repealed, and compare the tax they paid to what they paid on a bill from after the repeal. The difference in the tax as a percentage of the total bill can then be multiplied by the total amount of their phone bills during the 41 month refund period for which refunds are allowed, and viola! That estimated amount comes directly off their tax bill or with creative accounting, into their coffers as a tax refund.

Consumers, on the other hand, have no such luck. They either have to take a standard refund amount of between $30 and $60, depending on the number of dependents they can claim, or have to find every single bill from the 41 month period and list the actual tax from each bill on IRS Form 8913. One estimate says that 99% of consumers having their old bills would be eligible for three times as much of a refund as the standard refund amount. Why don't consumers get a break like business does? Why can't consumers compare a bill from before the tax repeal with one after and then apply a percentage to what they paid for phone service during the 41 months? People who don't know where their phone bills are probably have a checkbook or bank records that show monthly payments to their phone and wireless providers. At least AT&T has stepped up and will provide customers online access to their old phone bills. Hopefully, other companies will follow that lead, although Verizon has already said it will not provide free access.

This completes the circle of regressive taxation. Most of the people who can least afford to pay this tax are not going to get most of it back. People who are too poor to pay taxes will only get their $30 if they take the time and trouble to file a tax return. Businesses, who have lobbyists and accountants pushing for their interests, will receive complete refunds.

There is one more infuriating wrinkle. The IRS form 8913 instructions are confusing to consumers. Much of the text is devoted to the business formula that consumers cannot use. It talks about bundled services and mentions wireless as being part of that category, but does not make it clear that cell phone users have been subject to the excise tax and can list the tax amount from their bills on the form. Millions of cell phone users probably won't realize they are entitled to more than the TETR standard refund amount. That's just anti-democratic.